Melin'nas'in (The Name inside the Heart)
by MinionRipley
Summary: For ages untold, Solas has lived without the vallas'nas, the mark of the soulmate. Then he wakes, and everything changes. (F!Trevelyan/Solas)
1. Prologue

Tags: F!Trevelyan/Solas pairing, soulmates.

Melin'nas'in (The Name inside the Heart)

 _Prologue_

Long ago, when Dirthamen lost Falon'Din beyond the Veil but before he met the ravens Fear and Deceit, the god wandered alone. He traveled far across Thedas in search of the path to his brother, and while many of his stories have been lost to the ages, we yet keep the origin of the vallas'nas, the heart writing.

For though Dirthamen did not despair, he lamented he could not feel his brother near. He wept his sorrow to the earth, and the earth, in compassion, whispered to him a secret.

Through this secret, Dirthamen wove a spell from the purest places of his heart. He made a bond deeper than affection, deeper than friendship, family, or lovers. A bond in which all of the joys and pains of the world are shared, and loneliness cannot exist when beside the other. A bond so great only one comes in any lifetime: that of the nas'falon. The soulmate.

The magic took root with their names upon the wrists closest to their hearts, through which echoed the hearts of one another. Despite the distance, Dirthamen could feel Falon'Din again – and Falon'Din him in turn – at long last. In that moment they wept with happiness.

When they rejoined, they saw the good in this magic, and they shared it with the People. And so it spread over the years, till it spanned the entirety of our world.

Thus, Elgar'nan had Mythal, Andruil had Ghilan'nain, and Sylaise had June.

But not all shared in this joy, for the vallas'nas can take years to grow, and sometimes it never comes. This is not a curse; the vallas'nas knows the way in which it winds, and to be unbound is not to be unloved.

However, some believed that the vallas'nas had abandoned them, and they lost the love in their hearts. They turned upon the People with hatred in their souls, and the People knew them and called them dinlathelan. Among them was none other than Fen'Harel, whose own soul had grown bitter with jealousy. He gathered close to him those as well without love, and they plotted to destroy this magic.

In the end, though Fen'Harel sealed away the gods, he could not banish the vallas'nas. Even now, he walks the world, full of spite that he does not have his own.

Always trust in the vallas'nas, and remember the love in your soul.

—The origin of soulmate marks, as told by Gisharel, Keeper of the Ralaferin clan of the Dalish elves

* * *

Notes:

Elven taken from the Dragon Age wiki page, Project Elvhen: Expanding the Elvhen Language on Archive of Our Own (AO3), and Project Elvhen: An Elvhen Lexicon on AO3, with some modifications for my own purposes.

Dinlathelan – one dead to all love, one who has turned against the People

Nas – soul or heart, in an emotional or conceptual sense, not necessarily romantic

Nas'falon – soulmate, a magical bond between two people that transcends all other ties

Vallas'nas – heart writing, the magical mark of the name or other symbol of one's soulmate, typically appearing on one's left wrist or else whatever skin would be closest


	2. Chapter 1

Tags: F!Trevelyan/Solas pairing, soulmates.

Melin'nas'in (The Name inside the Heart)

 _Chapter One_

Solas wakes slowly to a cold world.

It weighs heavily upon him, more than he anticipated even after what he learned of the ages through the Fade. The air is thick with the chill, rasping in his chest with every labored draw of breath. He cannot move, not yet, still too weak from his long slumber and his limbs too dull to feel. Even now sleep pulls at him, tempting him to slip back into its safe hold of dreams and magic, of familiarity.

He resists. He has matters to see to, a plan to complete.

A small eternity passes as he pries himself free from the grip of uthenera, to open his eyes, to twitch his fingers, to flex his arms and legs, to tell he is at least hale and whole. He cannot guess how long it takes him. In the time of Arlathan, it was not uncommon to need several hours, sometimes days, to recover from deeper ventures into the Fade. But untold millennia have passed, and the chamber around him is blacker than pitch and he is alone. A private sanctuary ensconced in protective wards and known only to him. He could risk nothing less in the last years of the war. A war the world now only knows as a fading legend.

Now, though, the darkness crowds him, and the chill seeps deep into his bones, into his spirit, until warmth becomes but a memory. He presses a hiss between his teeth. Like a gaping wound, the absence of magic – cold, colder than he ever imagined – staggers him.

He draws upon his mana, aching for even a touch. It is sluggish, but a whisper in his palm, and he grits his teeth at the effort to merely summon a thread of flame—

And then a pulse of warmth twines about his left wrist like a gentle hand. It spreads, winding around his hand and up his arm, and a soft sigh breaks from his lips as the heat suffuses his chest, then further, until he is full of its sweet touch, like a welcoming embrace. _Some residual magic_ , he surmises, and wonders nothing more of it, content to soak it in like a cat in the sun.

Gradually, his thoughts return to him, and he traces the patterns of the magic from his wrist with a fingertip as he waits for them to gather.

 _The orb_ , he remembers. He hid it, his last key and failsafe against this ruin of a world. He must find and unlock it, then enter the Fade and tear down the Veil to restore the world to its proper state. The present time will suffer for it, he knows, but it is already near death, a _mistake_ , and he—

He stops his tracing.

The patterns are not Elven, the remnant glyphs of his own magic, as he assumed. They are of a tongue he has up to now only seen in dreams, and it spells—

 _It spells—_

He breathes hard, once, then again. He sits up and forces a strand of light to his hand – grimacing as he must pour so much of what little power he has left for that alone – and, with a final, readying inhalation—

He looks down.

And stares.

 _Evelyn Trevelyan._

After several long moments, he manages the name through a shape of a breath, then whispers it on another, then louder, until it echoes back to him through the cavernous chamber. Laughter – from hysteria, from the utter ridiculousness that he should find this _now_ of all times – builds in his chest, and his throat catches on a chuckle more pain than any true amusement. He does not think he could bear to find this amusing.

His nas'falon – his soulmate – lives. And not in the world he knew, full of brilliant wonders and boundless magic, but in this bleak shadow of a ruin he made and must now fix.

"Evelyn Trevelyan," he whispers again.

He does not know the name, cannot even guess its origin further than the southeastern regions of Thedas, what its inhabitants now call Ferelden and the Free Marches. Two whole nations, of cities, of towns, of swathes of country and wilderness, of lands he has not surveyed even in dreams for centuries. This _Evelyn_ may be anyone – a human peasant, a dwarven merchant, an elf picking out a life in the slums and alleyways the descendants of his people have fallen to. He has lived too many millennia to count, and so long grudgingly resigned himself to millennia more without, that its timing tastes like ash on his tongue.

He thinks of Dirthamen and Falon'Din, how they would laugh now if they could.

But his soulmate _lives_.

And—

It changes nothing. The world must burn for him to remake it, to restore it from the wisp it has withered to, and his soulmate will almost certainly perish with it. The people of this time are but shadows, cut off from the Fade, from nearly existence itself. They barely live, if one can even call their lives such.

He watches the amber flicker of light across the room in silence. Gold and silver tiles glint in the glimpses, preserved but tarnished, the magic of their brilliance now but a memory. The tools he stored have suffered a similar fate, foci and staves and more offering only whispers of a time now far beyond reach. When he can stand, he drains them of what little they have left, then discards what remains to the side. He does not have much – some plain fare preserved for a meal, garb fit for an anonymous traveler, a simple wooden staff he may channel his power through – but he has accomplished more with less.

He dresses and eats, the food hard and tasteless in his mouth. But it nourishes him well enough, serving to waken and invigorate him further. When he takes the staff in hand, its magic sings to his own, rekindling his connection to the Fade, and he sighs in relief as he at last feels warm besides…

Besides…

He finds his old robes, frayed and thin from ages of the slightest wear, and tears off a long strip. He wraps it around his left wrist several times over, till he can no longer distinguish the lines beneath, and pulls his sleeve down to cover it. The magic of it has receded since he ceased to search, now nothing more than the softest of caresses on his skin, but even that he must shut his eyes against. Steel himself. Close himself to its call.

 _It changes nothing._

After a long breath, he opens his eyes and steps out into a dying land.

* * *

Notes:

Elven taken from the Dragon Age wiki page, Project Elvhen: Expanding the Elvhen Language on Archive of Our Own (AO3), and Project Elvhen: An Elvhen Lexicon on AO3, with some modifications for my own purposes.

Nas – soul or heart, in an emotional or conceptual sense, not necessarily romantic

Nas'falon – soulmate, a magical bond between two people that transcends all other ties

Uthenera – waking sleep, a deep slumber immortals may enter for years

Vallas'nas – heart writing, the magical mark of the name or other symbol of one's soulmate, typically appearing on one's left wrist or else whatever skin would be closest


End file.
